Samsung’s Gear VR Recorded One Million Users Last Month

Oculus, Facebook-owned subsidiary, made public in its blog post that almost one million people used Samsung’s Gear VR headset last month. Such a figure is an indication that the number of customers using VR technology is rising at a rapid pace. This is a testimony to various postulations that VR is the tech for the future. It is not a fad as critics trying hard to make people believe. Indeed, the future hold promises for virtual reality.

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Sometime last year, Samsung and Facebook signed a partnership agreement to build Gear VR headsets. In the terms of the agreement, the South Korean tech giant will handle the building of the VR device while Oculus takes care of the software. Alongside, the company provides 250 games and various apps to users of the company’s products.

“A million is a kind-of-a-magic number for a lot of people to start taking this seriously,” Oculus Head of Mobile Max Cohen boasted while responding to questions from CNET’s Jessica Dolcourt at a press event this week. “It starts making more economic sense for others to join in.”

In addition to this development, it could also be seen that many big tech giants such as Google are also experimenting with virtual reality by offering VR headsets. Such speculations suggest that the search engine giant is about to launch a separate VR headset next week during the I/O developer’s conference, with a promise to enable its users to experience VR without connecting the headset to the Smartphone.

Samsung Reach 1 Million Gear VR Users

A postulation by a gaming research firm, SuperData Research, predicts that the VR industry would generate in the region of $40 billion by the end of 2020. Though it was stated that the companies will not generate much revenue this year as customer awareness is still not where it ideally should be. There is a need for more awareness about the entertaining, psychological and educational prospects of virtual reality to people and professions. The expensiveness of the devices is another factor that is still limiting users’ usage of VR.

Mr. Cohen, while announcing that the “one million people” include all the users that use Gear VR headsets to play games or watch movies, however, refused to reveal the company’s method of trailing the number of people using Samsung’s Gear VR at a point in time. He stated clearly that his company was not expecting to hit one million users right now. It was surprising and too soon to be believable given the fact that the device was still under a year.

Whichever way you look at it, having one million people using Gear VR headset can be seen as a positive indication for the South Korean tech giant. Samsung is at present offering Gear VR headset for $99. Moreover, it gives the impression that Samsung as of now is focusing on the sale of VR headsets rather than the price tag placed on them.

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